At the time of the present invention, it is frequent that a user of Web browsers and search engines clicks on a link in the search engine results only to find themselves on a website that offers none of the information they were searching for. Instead they often find webpages that simply waste their time. Many such webpages provide mostly links to other sites and frequently offer an overwhelming number of advertising links. Such websites that primarily offer links to other Websites may thus be referred to as “linking sites”. Other categories of website/webpage are found in search results that are irrelevant or of little inherent use with regard to what the user seeks and also effectively waste the user's time.
Many more domain names are purchased than there are active websites performing specific functions particular to a user or business. When a domain name purchaser “parks” a domain at a hosting company, that domain may show up as an “under construction” message, however frequently the user who makes the decision to park the domain opts for making it a “linking site” which has some financial advantage to them. Some registrant/hosting companies automatically make a parked domain into a linking site without compensating the owner at all. Also, there exist businesses that own a very large number of domains and place linking site functionality at those URLs. Some of these choose domain names that are misspellings of popular business names. Regardless of why and how such linking sites are placed on the Internet, it is very frequent today that someone performing web searches finds themselves looking at such a site when they hoped to be viewing the site belonging to a real business. This again wastes time and frustrates the user. A way to warn the user that they are about to navigate to such a site would be useful to many persons. Some may even want a way to exclude such a site from being referred to in their search results.
While search engine providers today claim to focus on providing “relevant” results, the reality seems to be that their primary mission is to make money—typically through advertising and linking-based referral services.
A user may find that a webpage located at a URL link provided on a search results page not only contains irrelevant information given their intended search, it also doesn't contain the search terms that they had specified. The basic format for specifying a search with any search engine includes an implied AND-function of the specified search term elements. As such, one would expect that each webpage corresponding to a search result URL link contains all the specified search term elements. Unfortunately today, it is frequent that many of the search term elements will be missing from the results webpage and in some cases all will be missing. Sometimes a subset of search term elements will be contained in a webpage located at a search result URL link while other specified search term elements are located in descendent webpages of the webpage located at the search result URL link. Thus, the descendent webpage may still at times be useful to the user. There is a reason a user specifies the initial set of search term elements. They expect results where each listed webpage contains all the elements. Knowing in advance which webpages contain which search term elements would be useful to aid the user in minimizing lost time and frustration.
FIG. 1 shows a typical search engine browser window 101 running on a personal computing device, in this case a laptop or notebook computer 100. In response to search term elements entered in the primary search term input bar 102, the search engine returns for example, results information groups 103 and 104, each group containing the title of a search result webpage, some form of excerpt from the webpage, and the URL link at which the webpage is located. To the left of this grouping sometimes appear specific links 105 related to the search engine itself, such as links to specific search engine tools, for example specific searches for images, videos, news, shopping, books, places, blogs, discussions, recipes, patents, and more. At the right of results information groups 103 and 104, it is common that groups of advertising information such as titles, links, and summaries appear, shown here as advertising information groups 106 and 107.
It would be advantageous if additional information appeared on a browser search results webpage such as that shown in FIG. 1 where this additional information provides insight to the user on what is contained in the webpage located at each search result URL such as URLs 108 and 109. This foreknowledge of the contents of these webpages could prevent the user from wasting their time reviewing pages that are not relevant to their search. It would also be advantageous if the user could optionally cause results webpage links that fall into undesirable or relevant categories (from their perspective and/or relative to their current search) to be deleted from their search results in order to focus their search more completely on irrelevant webpages. Such enhancements to the search process save users valuable time and avoid frustration—making the user experience more positive from both an emotional and productivity standpoint—especially for those users who perform web browsing and searching for a substantial part of their everyday job.